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Monday, January 13, 2014

What ASUU REALLY went on Strike For

In order to establish a context
for my international comparisons in the coming weeks, I thought it was
appropriate to familiarize my readers with what the Academic Staff Union of
Universities (ASUU) actually fought for—and won.

Dr. Kawu Ahidjo Abdulkadiri, a Consultant
Spine Surgeon at the University of Abuja Teaching Hospital, sent me a really
helpful article on the exact demands of ASUU, which many people seem unaware
of. What follows is an edited version of the article.

ASUU asked for and got
a special salary structure for themselves called Consolidated University
Academic Salary Structure II (CONUASS). This CONUASS was further made up of 3
components: A) CONUASS I [the previous one from 2007], B) Consolidated Peculiar
University Academic Allowances [CONPUAA], and B) Rent.

The CONPUAA was
apparently designed to capture all the other allowances that they wanted but
not captured in the CONUASS. The reason why they were allowed this was because
the committee agreed that “Nigerian academics represent the critical mass of
scholars in the society’ and as a result of this they ‘deserved unique
conditions that will motivate them ... to attain greater efficiency.”

In exchange for this
new pay, ASUU agreed to be of good behaviour and not do anything that disrupts
the academic calendar to get whatever it wants, i.e. no striking. Next thing
they did was to look at the countries where Nigerian academics frequently
migrated to e.g. Botswana, Ghana and other developed countries. Based on this,
they came up with a salary structure that would prevent this kind of brain
drain. They called this Table 1 in the agreement. The highest salary anyone
could earn based on this table was N7.5m per annum. But ASUU then seemingly
looked at the government’s condition and took pity on them because the
government didn’t have a lot of money and then gave them some sort of
‘discount’. This gave birth to Table 2 in which the highest possible salary was
N6m.

ASUU president Dr. Nair Fagge

It is the next bit that seems to have caused
all the problems and it’s easy to see why. Something called Earned Academic
Allowances was also agreed to by both parties. In essence, this was supposed to
be a kind of piece-rate payment where ASUU members as academic staff were paid
a fixed amount for each unit of work they did. So for supervising postgraduate
students, a Professor was to be paid N25,000 per student while a Lecturer 1 and
Senior Lecturer were to be paid N15,000 and N20,000 per student respectively.

For Teaching Practice/Industrial
Supervision/Field Trips, a Professor was entitled to N100,000 per annum.
Further, if a Professor did more than one field trip in a year, he would be
paid separately for each one. Even though this money was for field trips, such
an academic staff would be entitled to mileage and overnight allowance in line
with government regulations. It’s unclear why, after being paid N100,000 for a
field trip, the same person will then be entitled to mileage and overnight allowance.
And what is ‘field trip’?

There was also honoraria
for helping to conduct exams internally or externally ranging from N45,000 for
master’s degree to N105,000 for doctorates. For moderating external
undergraduate or postgraduate exams, there was a separate honoraria ranging from
N60,000 for 50 undergraduate students to N80,000 for more than 10 postgraduate
students.

To encourage young
academics to ‘further,’ their studies, postgraduate study grants were to be
given – N350,000 per session (up to a maximum of 2 sessions) for a science
based masters and N500,000 per session (up to a maximum of 4 sessions) for a
science-based doctorate. The figures were N250,000 and N350,000 respectively
for non-science studies.

Another N200,000 was
to be paid to external assessors for the position of Reader and Professor. Call
duty and clinical hazard allowances were to be paid to those who qualify per
existing government regulations.

It is unclear what a
Responsibility Allowance is (at least to me) but a Vice Chancellor and
Librarian were entitled to N750,000 per annum for this allowance while “all
other officers” were entitled to N150,000.

Excess Workload
Allowance was to be paid per hour to teaching staff ranging from N2,000 per
hour for a Graduate Assistant to N3,500 per hour for a Professor.

The problem with these
allowances is that there is no way for the government to know how much they
will cost in advance. They could cost N10bn or they could cost N100bn.
Lecturers would simply submit the bills and the government would have to cough
up the money. You can also see that ASUU played a clever hand by giving the
government a ‘discount’ on the base salaries while loading up with all sorts of
allowances elsewhere. For a lecturer earning, say, N3m per annum, it won’t take
much for him/her to earn an extra say 50% of that salary through all these
allowances.

There were other non-salary benefits in the
agreement as well. Each academic staff was entitled to a car loan equivalent to
his/her annual salary charged at 2% for administrative cost (stop laughing).
They were also entitled to a car refurbishment loan for those who wanted to
refurbish their old cars, again charged at 2%. At least with a car loan you get
to see the new car if you want to, but refurbishment? That’s just money in the
bush.

For housing loans, each academic was entitled
to 8 times his/her annual salary to buy a house. After 6 years’ service, an
academic would be entitled to a sabbatical leave. If this sabbatical was abroad,
the university would pay the “transport” costs for the academic, his or her
spouse, and up to 4 children. If hospitalised, an academic would be entitled to
6 months’ paid sick leave, which could be extended for another 6 months.

Retirement age was
increased from 65 to 70 and anyone who retired as a Professor would be entitled
to a pension equivalent to his/her final salary. Indeed even if the Professor
retired before the retirement age of 70, he would still be entitled to the
final salary pension provided he had served as a Professor for 15 years in a
university.

University staff and their spouses as well as
up to 4 children under the age of 18 were entitled to health insurance. There
are various other benefits in the agreement but these are mainly standard stuff
like maternity and 26 days leave.

What I find interesting is that while the
section on pay was quite specific in what university staff were entitled to, as
soon as you get to the other sections, everything turns to a “recommendation.”
So, for example, it was recommended that the government spend N472bn on the
universities in 2009, N498bn in 2010 and N549bn in 2011. Somehow, the Federal
Government was also supposed to fund the State Universities (at least
recommended to) on a per student basis i.e. N3.7m per student in total from
2009 to 2011.

Another recommendation
was for the state and federal governments to spend a minimum of 26% of their
budgets on education. Of this amount, at least 50% was to be allocated to
universities. Bear in mind that this was a negotiation between ASUU and the FG
– the primary and secondary school interests were not represented there, but ASUU
was effectively making a recommendation on how much they should get from the
budget. In all this, there are 1.2m students in our universities while we need
to find a way to get 10.5m children into school.

It was also
recommended that the Education Tax Fund be changed to a Higher Education Fund
i.e. solely for the universities, polytechnics and colleges of education. This
would be hilarious if it wasn’t so scandalous. After taking 50% of the budget,
the universities were to take 100% of the ETF as well. You couldn’t make it up,
but then, when you start negotiations from the premise that there is a critical
mass of nation-transforming scholars in our universities, this is not a
surprise. I wonder if the “mumu” NUT that threatened to go on strike in
solidarity with ASUU know that ASUU doesn’t really give a toss about them.

Universities were also
to access the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) for the training and
development of their staff i.e. more money for ASUU, and government was to
grant universities duty-free importation rights for educational materials.
Given that even our churches have been known to terribly abuse such waivers in
the past, this is amusing, to say the least.

Where the agreement
descends into outright farce is when it reaches the section on autonomy. Having
demanded and obtained all the above things from the government, ASUU then
proceeded to add insult to injury by asking that university autonomy and
academic freedom should be “enhanced and protected.” Note that this agreement wasn’t exactly
reached with smiles and good-natured banter; it came after a strike that
eventually forced the government to the negotiating table. So ASUU were not
only asking the government to give them as much money as they could demand with
a straight face, they were asking to be left alone to spend it and run their
affairs as they wish ranging from changing the laws impeding university
independence to allowing them admit students as they saw fit. You want the
government to look after you and your family by paying everything you want and
you want the same government to grant you freedom and autonomy. Eh?

You can hardly
come across the word ‘student’ in the agreement at all. And there is nothing
specific about infrastructure in there other than the large sums of money the
government was supposed to give the universities. There are many people today
making ignorant noises about government ‘honouring the agreement’ and even
coming up with things that are not in said agreement as ‘ASUU’s demands’. There
really isn’t anything for anyone in here other than ASUU.

You can also see the
sinister side of ASUU in the draft amendment bill with the way they were eager
to tightly regulate the private universities via the NUC to protect themselves…
going as far as recommending up to 5 year jail terms with no option of fine for
anyone who so much as uses his property for the operation of an unapproved
university.

Be that as it may, I
think the government should honour this agreement. It should pay every last
penny. That is the only way it might learn a lesson for the future. How you can
send a team of ex-academics to negotiate with a team of academics on your
behalf is beyond me. But, hey, I don’t know what went down in those days. Once
this strike is over, prepare for the next one because as sure as night follows
day, it will come.

Ultimately this
document shows the impossibility of reaching an ‘agreement’ after one party has
forced a negotiation via hostage taking. There is absolutely no way in this
life or the next we are going to have anything approaching education reform
until we break out of this death spiral of strikes and pay deals. The
conversation we need to have has not even begun at all. My suggestion will be
that the government should just pay ASUU whatever it is it wants right now and
then begin talks on university reform i.e. the lecturers need to be in class
when negotiations start. That way, we can know what everyone really wants.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.